Tom Mika's highlights from Sidoti:
“We want to exploit localization in China… and that’s real, especially with covid-19. They want to be independent. They want to be able to source locally. This (Super Photonics, our joint venture) is an independent company in China. We’re an investor in it—we’re a majority owner of it at the present time. We see, already, that’s a point of interest for a lot of capital that’s coming into that… into the photonics space in China.”
[slide] POET Health: Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SD-OCT)
-Fully hybrid integrated “SD-OCT” on a chip utilizing POET’s Optical Interposer
-Eliminates all mechanical alignment and movement
-Lens/Isolaters integrated to minimize reflections to the light
-Overall coupling losses minimized
-Power density optimization with multiple SLED chips at the Tx input
-Enables a dramatic reduction in size and cost for hand-held and point-of-care OCT
“This is something new. This is our look at the use of our technology for optical coherence tomography systems. This is taking what essentially today is a rack and putting it on a single chip—and a single chip that’s not much bigger than the one I showed you earlier (6mm x 9mm). This is in the concept stage but we actually believe we can do this. And if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this with an industry leader in this field.”
“As we’re preparing for bringing products to market, we need some additional talent. And if we’re able to attract the additional people—the additional 19 people over the course of this year—we will have this roughly 15-million-dollar annual operating expenses by then. Right now we’re at about 11-million-dollars… a little bit less annually, not quarterly. Obviously we’re looking for top-notch people in a number of engineering areas, both in Asia and in North America.”
“In US dollars, as of the end of March, we have $23.7 million. Even with that increase in annualized OpEx that I showed, we still have about two years of cash, even though we’re planning to be bigger by the end of the year.”
“We’ve got plenty of cash. We would like to be on the NASDAQ. And we think we should be on the NASDAQ at the right time, and for us the right time is the time in which we have more design wins, and the time in which the share price and the amount of shares outstanding allow us to do a reverse, which we have the authority to do… that our shareholders gave us… gave the board back a few months ago. We will do that at the right time. We have filled a shelf—it’s a 300-million-dollar shelf—that covers a 25-month period. We want to be prepared for anything that might happen. We’re expecting relatively explosive growth in this company and we just have to be ready with the ability either to raise capital if that turns out to be necessary, or to think about acquisitions that would really help us penetrate the market.”
Q&A:
“Gross margins of 40%, possibly 50%.”
“Some confusion about when we’re going to be a billion-dollar company, I already think we should be valued at a billion dollars, I was talking about a billion dollars in annual revenue.”